Slashdot Mirror

How about having the British apologize to everyone who was wronged by their hateful policies in the past?

An example of it would be Jallianwala Bagh massacre The british crown has to this date, 90 years since, refused to tender an unconditional apology for the murder of approx. 2000 men, women and children (including month old infants). ref Britain lost the opportunity - and the grace

... Sanskrit is making a comeback.

Apparently we have convicted one guy for spreading hate against Homosexuals. Though he ws acquitted in the supreme court on very shaky grounds.

I know only of Nazis being convicted of hate speech[1] in Sweden. But even though they have been convicted they get away with a lot. I would say that the swedish police is more worried about the miltant groups that oppose nazis than the nazis themself.

[1] That article is hate proganda. Not sure why I give it google credit..

You may excuse that case because he's a muslim, but it won't be long before similar convictions are carried out in general.

What makes you think Ted called this in?

I didn't write "Ted Turner," I wrote "Turner." I suppose if someone bought a Dell computer, you'd think that Michael Dell came over to set it up?

So your city has a long history of overreaction and incompetence?

My colleagues do fieldwork all over the world, so if by "your city" you mean cities all over the world including LA, San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago, Dallas, Albany and cities in Spain, France and Germany, then the answer is yes. Turns out police everywhere get twitchy about random devices left in public spaces, even before 9/11.

It's a frigging blinking sign!

Ahh, I get it. If the device looks cute, we can all safely ignore it

Sorry, but you just don't put random electrical devices in public places without telling people or leaving identifying information. I'm the first to criticize authorities for over reacting, but aside from the arrests last night, I don't see the problem. The police investigated, found out the truth, and that was it. Some roads were closed, but the city has hardly brought to a "halt".

First of all, to say that "Yugoslavia" caused the Bosnian war is as meaningless as saying that the United States caused the (U.S.) Civil War.

The Bosnian war started because some leaders of the Bosnian Muslims-- who as a people had historically been pro-Yugoslav-- wanted to secede from Yugoslavia and start their own Islamic state, and to impose Islamic law on all the people living there-- including the ethnic Serbs and Croats who made up a majority of the population. This was all detailed in their president Izetbegovic's "Islamic Declaration". Along with taking advantage of all the usual Muslim suspects-- including Osama's right-hand man al-Harbi-- who flocked there to fight the jihad, the Bosnian president also recreated a WWII-era SS Division to help in the fight.

A history lesson, since falcon5768 and probably others need it: hundreds of thousands of Serbian civilians were murdered in concentration camps during WWII, when they were on the Allied side while the Bosnians and Croats were allied with the Nazis. Memories are long in that part of the world, and Islamic law is not much fun either-- so is it any wonder that not just Serbs but moderate Muslims like took up arms to prevent the secession of Bosnia, or at least keep their own land out from under the thumb of Izetbegovic and his cronies?

I am confused why you say that the Bosnian war "DID kill US and UN troops". What US or UN troops were in the region? And as for the "mass slaughter" of Muslims at Srebrenica, the story is now starting to leak out that it's not so clear-cut as that-- most of the bodies have never shown up, and many of the dead turned out to be the troops of Muslim warlord Nasr Oric, who would use the UN-protected "safe areas" as a base from which to launch raids involving beheadings of prisoners... sound familiar?

The most laughable part of your post (and, by extension, the US's case against Bobby Fischer) is when you go on about how the sanctions were meant to prevent the world from contributing to the war. Of course, as the Guardian newspaper in England documented (much later after it was no longer inconvenient for the facts to come out), the US government was violating the embargo all along:

...the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.

The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran...

The reason you, and so many other people, hold this inaccurate and deluded view of the Bosnian war, is attributable mostly to the really top-notch propaganda war waged in the U.S. and U.K. media, making the Bosnian Muslims out to be the wonderful, multicultural good guys and the Serbs the baddies. It doesn't matter that so much of the lies have now been exposed-- like

They don't forget, they just don't believe it.

I think that is right. For years - a decade or more - there were a bunch of anti-terrorism types (like these ones) warning about the possibility of terrorist attacks on a huge scale. No one really took the threat seriously - and that was understandable - because such attacks had never actually happened. Now they have happened.

For years the same guys have been warning about the possbility of nuclear terrorism. We know for a fact that Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and they are one small revolution away from being run by terrorists. We know that North Korea has nuclear weapons, and they are already run by terrorists. And those are just the cases where we have no doubt. There are a number of other countries where nuclear weapons programs probably exist. Even worse we can predict with near certainty, thanks to the march of scientific progress, that nuclear weapons will continue to become cheaper and easier to acquire.

So do you think that we should all wait until after a few million people are killed before acting this time?

Capitalism is unsustainable, and the incredible growth of homo sapiens...is due to "spending" a bank account that was accumulated over billions of years: fossil fuels (source Thom Hartmann: The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight). We have reached the maximum rate of extraction, and this rate will begin to decline, while demand and human population continues to grow *expontentially* (source: Jay Hanson)

There have been gloomy talk about running out of oil for a long time:

1885, U.S. Geological Survey: "Little or no chance for oil in California."

1891, U. S. Geological Survey: Same prophecy by USGS for Kansas and Texas as in 1885 for California.

1914, U. S. Bureau of Mines: Total future production limit of 5.7 billion barrels, perhaps 10 years supply.

1939, Department of the Interior: Reserves to last only 13 years.

1951, Department of the Oil and Gas Division: Reserves to last 13 years.

The truth is that as oil reserves are continuing to increase because new technology is applied to new areas.

We don't actually know 100% how oil was formed (no one has ever been able to produce the equivalent of crude oil, yet we can make man-made diamonds). One particular theory claims that the lower crust of the planet is bathed in hydrocarbons from the time of planet formation, and the oil we see is only the little bits that get caught in traps near surface. In that case we'd never run out of oil. Who knows?

Nobody knows. Nobody knows how much oil is left, until a well runs dry. You can guess about it, but you are often wrong, because we can't count the drops of oil in every crack and crevice thousands of feet below the ground/ocean. Then once it "runs dry," you begin pumping in water to displace more oil, and you don't know how much more will come out. Nor do we know how much natural gas might be present, nor oil in oil shales.

I suggest reading Julian Simon's When will we run out of oil? Never!.

Other interesting tidbits: The trends in energy costs and scarcity have been downward over the entire period for which we have data. These "high oil costs" Americans complain about today are, after adjusting for inflation, not much different than 20 years ago. Energy has become less and less important as measured by its share of GNP.

And let's say we do run out of oil. Well, we'll have to get by somehow, perhaps nuclear/fusion using batteries, hydrogen, or other chemical energy storage technique. Long before the oil really runs out, there will be an economic incentive to build these devices (well, there will be in capitalist countries anyway). Looking at the price of oil right now, I don't expect to see them much in the near future.

Capitalism encourages unsustainable population growth, depletion of natural resources, and the creation of waste products.

The first part of this is really wrong. Capitalism increases the supply and efficiency of use of mineral resources. It also increases the size of sustainable populations. You may also want to compare starvation rates of US versus Mao's farming policies that killed 30 million people by starvation.

Capitalism does increase the creation of waste products, but as you mentioned, it does produce a market incentive to deal with them in a halfway reasonable way. The greatest environmental problems exist in situations where there is not ownership (waterways and multipoint atmospheric pollution).